Building a new desktop tower

Im planning on building myself a new tower (as a sort of Christmas holiday project) to replace my somewhat dilapidated current one.

Ive picked out all the components I need, and made sure that they all should slot up together nicely, however I come a bit unstuck when it comes to choosing the tower casing itself.

There are so many sizes and shapes, im a bit confused as to what it is i exactly need! Can anyone out there give me some pointers or hints as to what I need to look for in trying to figure out whether all my components will fit?

Would be very helpful if you could list your components,particularly the motherboard, is it ATX or M -ATX etc. Is your graphics card one of the larger/longer ones. This will have a bearing on case size. Are you looking for silent or one with lots of places to put LED fans for a bit of bling? Do you want your case windowed? What is your budget.

I have just built a HTPC which required a small silent case, my last desktop is water cooled so needing a larger case.

Just as an aside, do make sure that your boot HDD is running at 7,200rpm rather than the slower type at 5,400rpm.

I'm only saying that because for a couple of years I've been slightly concerned at a fairly slow boot up. Last week I found that I was using the slower type of disk while my second (backup) disk was the faster one. I imaged the disk, changed the boot order in BIOS, rebooted and knocked 2mins 10secs off the boot time!!

Cooler: The one that comes with your CPU will be more than enough for you. If you want to put a couple of extra fans in your case that's up to you. The case should have at least one fan at the front,to pull cool air in and one fan at the back to push hot air out. If your case comes with fans at the top,even better.

You can get pretty decent cases for £30- £40 the one you have given the dimensions for is rather tiny,with a big GPU pumping out heat plus the CPU airflow is important,small cases do not give you that unless you are building a media centre PC where not much heat is being produced so minimum cooling is needed.

I would,if you can ,try and get the i5 rather than the i3 far better gaming chip.